Beyond ad blocking — the biggest boycott in human history

Calling it a boycott is my wife’s idea. I say she’s right. Look at the definitions:

Merriam-Webster: “to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (as a person, store, or organization) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions.”

Wikipedia: “an act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for social or political reasons. Sometimes, it can be a form of consumer activism.”

Free Dictionary: “To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, dealing with, or participating in as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means ofcoercion.”

Close enough.

Ad blocking didn’t happen in a vacuum. It had causes. We start to see those when we look at how interest hockey-sticked in 2012. That was when ad-supported commercial websites, en masse, declined to respect Do Not Track messages from users:

As we see, interest in Do Not Track fell, while interest in ad blocking rose. (As did ad blocking itself.)

Leading up to this, from 2007 to 2011, advertisers and publishers cranked up tracking-fed advertising, aka “behavioral” advertising. Or, to the business itself, adtech.

Here are Google Trends searches for nine pieces of adtech arcana, none of which were in use before 2007:

Add retargeting to that last one (note: you can’t search more than five terms at a time), and you get this:

Retargeting is the most obvious form of adtech. It’s how one ad shows up over and over again, at site after site, because some part of adtech’s collective brain (combining all the stuff trending in the graphs above, and more) decides to treat you like one of those enemies in a video game that has to be shot over and over again until it finally blows up. Not surprisingly, as retargeting started to rise, so did searches for “how to block ads”:

It is typical of business, even on the Internet (where everybody has power, and not just the big institutions), to think that ad blocking is a problem that affects only them, and that it’s up to them to fix it. (A new example: Secret Media.)

Actually, it’s up to us. Because we’ll win. Then we’ll find ourselves saying again what Cluetrain first said for us sixteen years ago:

we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.

Deal is the operative verb here. Publishers and companies that advertise have power too, and we need to engage it, not just fight it. (In his speech at the UN today, President Obama had a good one-liner that applies here: “We all have a stake in each other’s success.”)

The only way engagement will work is through tools that are ours, and we control: tools that give us scale — like a handshake gives us scale.What engages us with the Washington Post should also engage us with Verge and Huffpo. What engages us with Mercedes should also engage us with a Ford dealer or a shoe store.

Wee Red Bird, let me know when you find such an ad-funded coffee shop. And let me know if they’ll serve you if you’re wearing ad-blocking AR googles (which is a better analogy than avoiding to look at the ads, a mental impossibility if printed magazines are any indication).

So again, if you think that ad blocking is honorable and not stealing content, then feel free to let the sites know that you are using an ad blocker. Declare the ad blocker in the user-agent header for instance.

Wee Red Bird, a few more thoughts. To be honest, I see some merit to your analogy and it is making me think more (thanks).
There are many things in a store that I’m not required to pay attention to (although the shopkeeper certainly hopes I do).

On the other hand, there are relevant differences: (1) content and bandwidth of ad-funded sites are hardly offered as free doughnut samples, (2) automatic blocking is not the same as a lack of attention (and it’s hard to find a real-world analogy, until we get AR).

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